As I’ve mentioned infrequently, I’ve been doing some volunteer work for the Howard Dean campaign for the past few months. I now have an official title — “Senior Internet Advisor” — so I figure I should come out of the closet entirely.

The title formalizes what I’ve been doing so far: Sundry writing for the campaign and talking with them about Net issues. I’ve also done a little speaking on behalf of the campaign — well, once, substituting for Joe Trippi, the campaign manager, at a panel in DC on the Internet and democracy. Now I’ll be doing more writing, advising and speaking for the campaign. I’m thrilled, of course.

Why Dean? Because he’s the candidate closest to my views who can beat Bush. The Dean campaign has been doing an astounding job of energizing a base of voters who haven’t cared enough to come to the polls before. I like that strategy a lot better than trying to get 51% of the center by out-Bushing Bush.

And no campaign has ever gotten the Internet so right. They aren’t just working the email lists and using the Net as a way to drive down the cost of mass politicking. From Joe Trippi on down they “get” the Net. They understand that it’s about giving voice to the “ends” of the Net (AKA us), that it means they lose some control of their message, that they need to enable groups to self-organize, that it’s about listening and conversations more than about center-out broadcasting. This is an end-to-end campaign. The staff is webby to the core. If you met ‘em, you’d love ‘em.

So, yeah, I’m for Dean. And I’m proud and a-tingle at being to help in some little way.

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Christopher Lydon continues to invent our expectations for audioblogging. Elaine Scarry, Steve Kinzler, the InstaPundit … this stuff is coming at us like an on-demand radio interview show.

Because I’m on an AOLousy dialup connection this week, I haven’t been able to listen, but I listened to Chris’ interviews for years on “The Connection” so I feel real confident in recommending them even without having heard them.

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Over at BlogCritics I’ve blogged a review of Shakespeare & Co.’s production of “King Lear.”

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The FBI apparently wants to be able to wire tap Internet phone calls by bugging ISPs. But, because phone call bits look just like every other type of bit, this would enable — or require — the FBI to tap all the Internet packets going to or from a particular tappee.

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You can listen to tracks from the CD called “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” here. (Thanks to Michael O’Connor Clarke.)

I’ve written to the composer, Vert, to see if it’s just a coincidence…

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I like what Earl Mardle has to say about the Semantic Web.

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I’m away from home for 2 weeks and the free SMTP server I’d been using – softhome.com – seems to have gone belly up. Does anyone know of a reliable free server I can use to send email via Outlook? I just signed up for HotPOP but it’s succeeding at sending mail about one in ten times. H-e-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l-lp!

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Here’s an image from the terrorist futures market that you’ve undoubtedly been reading about. No, it isn’t a joke. It lists:

Jordan King overthrown 4th Quarter: $0.24
N. Korea Missile Attack 4th Quarter: $0.15
U.S. Recog. Palestine 1st 04: $0.32
Arafat Assassinated 1st 04: $0.17

(Thanks to Gary Unblinking Stock for the link.)

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Last night, a friend who’s 35-40 years old told me that when he went to high school in Rochester, NY, the water was so polluted by Eastman Kodak that a friend’s science fair experiment consisted of developing film by using water from the local river.

Now that’s a science fair project!

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Martin Jensen is having trouble installing Movable Type because of the vagaries of his host. He’s trying to create a site that will help the “trainwreck” he sees coming to the health care industry because of HIPAA. If there are any MT experts around who’d like to give Martin a hand, you can email him here. (There are some more details in his contribution to discussion board.)

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“Happy Birthday” words and music copyrighted Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill, 1934. “Doc” is a trademark of the Walt Disney Company™.

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Andrew Odlyzko who has the annoying tendency to be right and, worse, fact-based about it has posted a paper called “Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet.” It is to appear in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on eCommerce. From the abstract:

The rapid erosion of privacy poses numerous puzzles. Why is it occurring, and why do people care about it? This paper proposes an explanation for many of these puzzles in terms of the increasing importance of price discrimination.

From the beginning section of the paper:

The key point is that price discrimination offers a much higher payoff to sellers than any targeted marketing campaign. Adjacent seats on an airplane flight can bring in revenues of $200 or $2,000, depending on conditions under which tickets were purchased. It is the potential of extending such practices to other areas that is likely to be the “Holy Grail” of ecommerce and the inspiration for the privacy erosion we see. For it is the privacy intrusion represented by airplane tickets being non-transferable contracts with named individuals that enables airlines to practice yield management in the extreme form it has reached.

In an email to a mailing list Andrew writes: “If you consider the main questions in communications, namely how open or closed networks should be, should the end-to-end principle prevail, etc., they are really questions about price discrimination, as in ‘Should your cable TV company be able to charge you more for a bit of voice traffic than for a bit of video?’”

PS: Fun Fact from the paper:

Coca Cola was discovered
in 2000 to be experimenting with soda vending machines that would raise prices when temperatures were
high.

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Small Pieces Loosely Reiterated

Boris Anthony has found a CD called “Small Pieces Loosely Joined,” which is also the name of my book. He recommends a google search to get more info about it and writes: “It appears to be some kind of electro music done by a brit in germany and sold mostly in japan… ;)”

According to a review at NZZ Online (and forgive whatever mistakes I make in translating it):

The British, living-in-Cologne multinstrumentalist Adam Butler, alias Vert, loves daring soundworks. His new album, “Small Pieces Loosely Joined,” is an experimental pop album, moving between spontaneity and discipline, poetry and science, classical beauty and futuristic aggressiveness.

Wow, exactly like my book! (There’s a Japanese review here.)

Do you think Larry Lessig (at the new address of his blog site, btw) would agree to handle my law suit?

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I’m on vacation with a bad dialup connection, so I’m passing along these links without having tried them.

Meaning Map apparently is a way of exploring “opinion space,” seeing how opinions are statistically related.

Martin Jensen has posted a page about how HIPAA, touted as requirements that will protect patient privacy, is being implemented in a way that will bring the health care industry, and possibly the economy, to its knees.

Chip says that this site will help you select your presidential candidate.

WEASEL WORDS: Don’t blame me if you don’t like ‘em. I’m just the messenger.

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Have I mentioned that I’m sorta kina intermittently on vacation for the next couple of weeks? I’ll still be blogging, but I might miss a day or two. Like yesterday. (Actually, yesterday I drove a total of 10 hours for a 2-hour meeting, so we’re not counting that as vacation.)

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Care for a little cheap irony?

According to an article in eWeek (July 7) by Peter Galli, “the linux operating system has transformed the digital animation movie business over the past two years…” So, the same entertainment industry that would like very bit on the Internet to be owned and accounted for is happy to reap the benefit of the open source movement.

If, as it has been argued, the “trusted” computing initiative (AKA the Orwellian computing initiative) ends up locking out open source software even as it locks in Microsoft as the player for Hollywood’s products, we will go from cheap irony to real irony.

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I just got a spam trying to sell me the Iraqi Most Wanted deck of cards that actually had a clever subject line:

Saddam’s Evil Biological Weapons: His Sons.

Hard to find anything good to say about them. Nor do I want to.

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There’s a story in this photo waiting to be written.

In fact, I bet someone’s going to point us to where the story’s already been written…

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Doc’s Linx Journal article on saving the Net is setting new records for page views and comments. Jeez, all it does is tell the truth. I don’t see what the fuss is about :)

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Here’s a site that lets the world vote in the next US presidential election.

Since the world’s vote counts about as much as that of a confused elderly Jewish lady in Dade County, Florida, it’s too bad the site is only publishing the results afterthe US polls close when it can have absolutely no effect. (Thanks to Wiebe de Jager for the link.)

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Dan Gillmor makes the point that we have to keep hammering home: Creators of creative works do not own their works the way land owners own their land. The US Constitution gives authors some rights that land owners have but carefully circumscribes them: creators have a monopoly on the right to publish their works for a limited time (originally 14 years, now life + 70) and within a limited domain (Fair Use).

Is this unfair to creators? Nope, and not just because creating a public domain is a greater good to which the creator must bow. Creators do this funny thing of publishing their works. In making their works public those works cease to be fully private the way land can be. You can’t both make it public and demand that the public not use what they’ve bought. Some leeway is required. Copyright law tries to preserve that leeway, despite the Big Lie of Big Content.

And with digital rights management — or what Dan more accurately calls “digital restrictions management” — on the way, the owners of copyrights will be able to control with near perfect precision how you use what you’ve bought. Thus, the noble compromise that is copyright will be torn up, leaving the public as trespassers in what used to be the public domain.

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Our daughter just selected her courses for her first year at college. Among the four: Existentialism. Which has me a little scared.

Existentialism did a good job on me in my freshman year of convincing me that life is meaningless. I moped. Ordinary objects lost their significance even as I gazed at them. I looked around for a local Seine to plunge into. It took several more years for me to figure out why I think existentialism is wrong: the sort of meaning it laments hasn’t been with us since God died, but other (lesser) meaning has always been with us. It’s like me saying I’m unloved because Uma Thurman hasn’t fallen for me, while ignoring that Ann Geller has. Well, maybe it’s a little like that. [Note: I'm Ann's husband.]

I’d been thinking about exisentialism anyway — and why I like it — because of the conversation the Happy Tutor and AKMA had last week. Akma began by being offended by Bush’s bald-faced lying. The Happy Tutor wondered how a post-Modernist can distinguish truth and lie, and then reflected further. Akma, disdaining the pomo label, replied. Wonderful stuff.

As the Tutor notes, his words may sound like a personal attack on Akma, but they do not indicate any lack of respect. Truly. Tutor’s question is: How can a deconstructionist hold moral truths? Hasn’t post-modernism pulled its own ground out from underneath it?

Is there a harder question? In this newly connected world we’re more aware than ever that other cultures hold beliefs contrary to ours but with as much conviction. Even after we weed out the cultures that we count as crazy or evil (and that weeding out is, of course, fraught with its own problems), we’re left with “legitimate” ideas that others hold and we reject. So, do we let ourselves be paralyzed into inaction? Do we take absolute actions — like killing people in war — as if our beliefs had absolute foundation? Isn’t this the story of the past century? Isn’t it what western culture has been building to for two millennia?

And in this situation, existentialism offers an answer that is unsatisfactory but is at least self-aware. Sartre knew that he held his beliefs and values largely because of the historical situation into which he was thrown, but he didn’t let that keep him from the important work of killing Nazis. He got his hands dirty (directly or indirectly) because there is no choice. He acted absolutely while aware of the limits of his own understanding and the arbitrariness of his own situation.

So, while I disagree with how existentialism understands the problem, I am in sympathy with its “solution.” I don’t like it. I just don’t know of a better one.

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Dan Gillmor writes about the scandal about electronic voting machines that’s just waiting to happen.

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Ok, I’m up and running in Mandrake, using kde as my desktop. So far so good…

The only hitch I hit when installing Mandrake was that it asked me for a CD that I didn’t have. I thought it must have been the third CD in the set, but I downloaded it twice and burned the image 3 times and it still wouldn’t accept it.
So, I finally said to just skip it, which it did without complaint. I think it might have been internationalization settings.

The kde desktop looks pretty and the file browser is modeled on Windows Explorer, which isn’t a bad thing. Since I’m writing this entry from the linux desktop, I am apparently connected fine.

It looks like it’s playing mp3’s, which I couldn’t get the RedHat distribution to do. Of course, I don’t hear any sound, but the file is generated a graphic sound wave in the xmms player, so that’s pretty much the same thing as hearing it, isn’t it? I refuse to be stopped by details!

The Mandrake Control center tells me that it didn’t install samba, required to see the Windows machines on my network. Hmm. I could have sworn that I checked that box during the installation process. Well, it’s installing samba now. And it’s found the folders on my XP laptop. Cool!

And now it’s lost them. Oh well, it was cool for a moment…Wait, they’re back!…But it can only see the directories…But it’s auto-configured the fstab file…. Alternating fits of coolness…

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Since I’ve been setting up linux on a spare machine simply as a way to explore linux from the point of view of a desktop user, and since I’ve been having problems with the RedHat 9 desktop environment, I decided to start all over with a clean install of Mandrake’s linux distribution, including letting it redo the partitioning. Clean sweep, baby!

So far the installation has gone pretty easily (he said jinxing himself). I hit a bump at the beginning, but I can’t blame Mandrake for that. I’d downloaded the CD images and burned them last night. They’re readable in Windows and RedHat could see the files, but my linux machine wouldn’t boot from them. (It also wouldn’t boot from the Mandrake floppy booter I’d made. Odd.) So, I installed a new CD reader, and now it’s working fine. (So far.) It does make you wonder if the instability of the RedHat install was related to the flakiness of my CD player, although I’d be happier about that if it were crashing when it was accessing CDs.

Anyway, Mandrake has asked me the expected questions. This time I’m not being stingy about which packages it’s installing. It says I have 13 minutes to go…

Previous linux entry is here.

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The Democratic National Party is soliciting funds to air this commercial.

The ad twice shows Bush saying “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It then tells us that everyone knew that was false. But the real aim of the ad is, I believe, to hang that phrase around Bush’s neck the way the Republicans hung “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” around Clinton’s.

And the way the administration tried to wiggle out of it by claiming that the full statement – truncated in the ad – only said that the British had learned this, not that it was true, is more disingenuous than Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

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NPR’s All Things Considered ran a commentary of mine last night on wikis and social software. You can hear it by going here to launch the Real or Windows Media Player. Or, you can try clicking here to play it in the Real client.

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Jason Kottke’s got a classic example of how a little trust can double your business. It’s exactly the sort of math that so many businesses never think of computing.

(Thanks to Chris Worth for passing along the link.)

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For the past few weeks I’ve been noodling with an article on the Semantic Web. At the moment I’m particularly interested in the scope of its ambitions and whether they’ve changed over time. If you know about this and would like to talk with me, send me an email: self@evident.com.

Thanks.

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According to an article in Salon by Katharine Mieszkowski:

Fresh out of subcommittee, a new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004.

Because otherwise the terrorists will have won.

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“The…picture of a disengaged, incurious, passive receptacle for his adviser’s machination is so widely accepted around here [Washington] that even the administration officials desperately defending themselves over the crude manipulation of prewar intelligence have in the process depicted Bush himself as little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

Thomas Oliphant, The Boston Globe today.

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Give this four seconds and it will make you laugh.

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Ryan Irelan has been transcribing Chris Lydon’s audio interviews. The transcript of mine is here. (Thanks, Ryan!)

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Kath Dewar writes from New Zealand, pointing to a local blog, written by Russell Brown. A quick scan shows that topics range from in-depth discussions of NZ politics to a disquisition on the Japanese and Korean insistence on topping their pizzas with corn.

Kath also points to “our best independent news site here in nz”: Scoop. Maybe I visited it on an atypical day, but the two lead stories are on the scandalous truth behind the death of David Kelly and the scandalous truth behind the death of Vince Foster. Also: “Breast feeding mum sells sex legally.” It’d be unfair to generalize…

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Linuxman Greg points us to scans of the forged documents about the uranium from Niger.

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Ken asks eight questions of the candidates with regard to their Internet and telco policies. The questions are excellent, each wrapped in a paragraph of exposition. I doubt he’ll get answers at the same level of detail since his questions are the type of things campaign staffs (staves?) write policy papers about, and it’s still early in the campaign.

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I am sorely tempted to allow my Windows instinct to take over and do a clean reinstall of linux. I know it’s the wrong impulse. I just don’t know what the alternative is.

My linux desktop continues to lock up, rejecting mouse and keyboard input. This is reproducible. Switching to Ximian hasn’t helped. It’s clearly a software issue because the system responds to ctl-alt-f3, so it’s still getting keyboard input. And the mouse cursor moves; none of the buttons work, however.

So, last night I thought I’d try the kde desktop instead. But I seem to be stuck in a loop. If I use redhat-config-packages and select “kde,” it tells me that I need two “cups” apps. I know Ximian installed cups stuff, and printing to a printer hanging off an XP machine actually works. (Cups has something to do with printing.) If I then deselect kde from the package manager and try to install the cups stuff from the RedHat CD, it fails because it conflicts with the Ximian cups stuff. I suppose I could uninstall the Ximian cups stuff by hand and then hope that cups reinstalls from the CD, but I am just about certain to miss some files and miss some file that keeps track of the files because I Don’t Know What I’m Doing™.So, just starting over seems like a good idea

Someone stop me before I get all windowsy on linux’s ass.

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I wrote about how remarkable it is that a presidential candidate has found himself thrown into the wildest sort of Internet melee, which led to my blogging about how much is contained in a simple statement by Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, in his totally human comment on that fray.

So, now it’s been continued on my own discussion board. Ken Camp criticizes Dean for “walking the fence” on issues. “All I really want is for him to stand up and say something.” Seems like an odd complaint addressed to Howard Dean. In any case, Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, has responded. He says, in part:

The easiest thing in the world would have been to tell people on the Lessig blog exactly what they wanted to hear — so I think your criticism of playing the Internet audience is a little off-base. We really were and are trying to open a dialog to help us formulate our policies as we move forward — and to do it from the bottom up.

Ken replies. But I think he’s missing the bigger point: Whether you agree with Ken that Dean’s blogging at Lessig’s site should have had more detailed proposals (and, fwiw, I do not agree) this has never happened before. Here’s what’s new or at least unusual:

A first-tier — even front-running — presidential candidate has written his own stuff and posted it for the world to see with no focus groups and little or no staff review.

The candidate did not pretend to know more than he does and did not rely on the in-depth knowledge available to him via the policy folks on his campaign staff. He instead asked his readers for help understanding the issues.

A completely open discussion was enabled for the world to see, with no filtering to exclude crazies, political opponents and political operatives.

The candidate and his campaign manager read and responded to that open discussion.

The conversation is now spilling over onto other sites.

Before this, what would you have had to do to get the ear of a potential president of the United States? You could have a column in a national newspaper or you could get a hernia toting sacks of cash to the campaign headquarters.

Can we at least pause for a moment of delight before we become blasé?

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Dan Bricklin points to an Appeals Court’s opinion on fair use. The court found that it was indeed fair use for a search engine to display thumbnails of copyrighted images in its search results.

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The Village Voice reports on Invisiblog, a site for anonymous blogging. It uses as its example dissidents within the Hasidic community. (Thanks to Bill Koslosky for the link.)

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